P A S T E P O T P E T E

I'm in Venice now, flying home on Thursday. Venice is awesome at first, but is not that much fun after you've had a chance to see it. It's fundamentally kind of insane, like nothing else on earth (I don't think I completely understood that there are NO STREETS, just water and sidewalks). It's beautiful and weird...but it's also packed to the gills with tourists, even on a Monday at the beginning of the tourist season. The food also blows, mostly because the restaurants don't have to do much to keep packing in the tourists.

The idea of the Marvel Universe coming together is awesome to me, and I am really looking forward to seeing Iron Man in English. The sheer number of movies Marvel is greenlighting kind of worries me, though. A one year turnaround for Iron Man 2? Thor, Captain America, and the Avengers in the next two years? Why? Marvel is not in a "strike while the iron's hot" kind of situation where they need to pump out a bunch of superhero movies ASAP before the country's taste moves on to something else. The Marvel Universe is the closest thing we have to modern American mythology. People will wait for good films. The only thing that will fuck it up is churning out shitty/underdone movies, and I'm worried that's something Marvel could get itself into. I'd rather them do one big Summertime blockbuster and one slightly smaller movie during Christmas...don't go for two blockbusters per summer.

They need to be careful with who they're casting, and with which stories they're choosing to turn in to superhero films.

Matthew McConaughey as Captain America? I don't think that's a done deal yet, but it's rumored...and that sounds like joke casting to me. I don't know how they'll make a good Captain America movie. Going lighthearted sounds like a disaster. I also think that overdosing on the Cap iconography (his shield, the costume) is going to hurt overseas business prospects for the movie, which is no good. Iron Man has been absolutely everywhere in Europe the last couple of weeks. I think they're better off building their way into that character by introducing Cap in the Avengers movie.

Plus, I read that they were thinking about doing Ant Man. Seriously? Fucking Ant Man? I'd rather see a Paste Pot Pete movie.

They need to do a Black Leopard (a Spike Lee joint). Maybe Tyrese can star, I don't think he's been doing much since 2 Fast 2 Furious. I also want to see Dr. Strange.

St00nanotti